Relics
by Willy Pete
Summary: A simple delivery to an alien archaeological site turns into a living nightmare for Leela.


Relics 

By Willy Pete ( futuraman@hotmail.com ) 

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Author's note: The following is my first foray into fan fiction, and the longest story of any genre I've written to date. It took almost a month, all told, plus a really horrifying case of carpal tunnels (my fingers now make a sound like breaking glass whenever I flex them), but I'm reasonably happy with the end product. Something like this story's been kicking around in my head for a year or two now, so I just went ahead and set it in the Futurama universe, and whaddaya know; it worked.   
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The light beat down on the Arizona soil brutally. Forty degrees Centigrade produces its own special brand of silence, when the desert fauna have given up on foraging for the day and are just trying to find some shade and avoid heatstroke. The desert snakes and tortoises had decided that the heat was too much of a good thing and burrowed in. The cacti, unable to flee the searing sunlight, concentrated on looking as miserable as it is possible for plants to look. The air stood spitefully still, refusing to permit the briefest revitalizing breeze. Nothing was moving or making a sound in Death Valley that day except the tanks.   
Tomahawk took an armor piercing 50 mm shell from Taxman through the fuel cell and cratered the desert floor in a gout of violet-white plasma. Taxman had almost a second to relish its victory before Death's Head blew its sense cluster to fragments with a well aimed concussion grenade. Blind and deaf, Taxman could only lurch about aimlessly as Death's Head brought its powerful free electron laser to bear on its prey. A blindingly intense thread of red light skewered the bearings of Taxman's gyro next, causing it to leap two meters into the air with a CRUNCH that could be heard two miles away. The tank landed tilted at a 30 degree angle on the leading edge of its ground effect skirt and hung there for the next five seconds while its ruined gyro expended the last of its energy ricocheting around the engine compartment like a 500-kilo lead ping-pong ball. Before it had even hit the ground, though, Taxman had analyzed the nature of the damage, computed the path of the laser and which unit was responsible, and looked up some pertinent data from its memory bank on the anatomy of the offending tank. Balancing on one corner, Taxman whipped its main gun around too quickly for the human eye to follow and fired four times at a point slightly to the left of the laser's origin. Death's Head did not slow its forward progress, but the battle was already over as far as it was concerned. Its brain was raining gently across the battlefield in a cloud of spiderweb-thin Platinum-Iridium fibers.   
Fry whooped like a maniac, one voice in the deafening berserk howl of the crowd. In the tiny corner of his brain that was not occupied with the task of whooping, leaping up and down and pouring his 2-litre "Bucket O' Beer" over his head, he happily reflected that the nicest words anyone could ever hear were "Hey Fry, I won three tickets to the big tank fight. You and Bender wanna come with?". In his book, any future in which robotank fighting was an Olympic sport was A-Ok.   
Leela, on his right side, was standing on the back of her chair yelling something incoherently triumphant and doing an honest-to-god victory jig. Bender, meanwhile, was desperately hollering advice. "Come on, you bastard, I've got two grand riding on you! Dammit, he's right behind you! Oh, God, no, don't use your minigun, crap, don't catch on fire... DAMN it!" The thunderclap of Claymore's demise was almost drowned out by the audience's insane hooting.   
Leela realized that her pager had been vibrating slightly faster and more regularly than the rest of her surroundings for about the last minute. She unclipped it from her belt, hit the RECEIVE button, and hurled it into the crowd below. A translucent little glowing effigy of Hermes Conrad yelped in stark shock as it was batted from hand to hand like a beachball for several seconds before shutting itself off. _Screw it,_ she thought flippantly, _there are some times when pagers just don't apply_.   
Five minutes or an hour later, who knew or cared, the last explosion ceased echoing off of the mesas encircling the field in the distance, the laser absorbing curtain of almost-invisible Coheropaque dropped and the military-grade force barrier was shut down. Eight thousand boisterous, drunken fans swarmed into the field to surround the crippled but victorious Taxman. Choking on toxic smoke and roaring a dozen different victory chants, they lifted the last tank to their shoulders as it waved triumphantly with its main gun. The blazing sunlight, the smell of ozone, the taste of beer, the sounds of singing and cheering, and the feel of your spine disintegrating under twenty tons of sentient metal as you made your way to the Winners Circle with the hero of the day added up to produce a hell of a party atmosphere. The greatest post-game celebration for any sporting event on any world was underway. 

* * * 

Much later, the fish-with-an-overbite shape of the Planet Express freighter settled into its hangar very slowly and carefully. As Leela walked down the boarding ramp, the Professor dashed out to meet her. "Leela, for the love of God, why-"   
"Shh." Leela slowly waved for silence. With one hand pressed gingerly against her temple, she wandered off to see if she remembered where Zoidberg's office was. Bender came down the ramp next, rolling, followed closely by Fry who was looking a bit on the undead side.   
"Fry. What in hell took so long? Never mind," he added in response to Fry's apologetic gurgle, "We've got a major delivery that has to go out TONIGHT. A pricey one. I'd get Hermes to brief you, but all that lazy pencil pusher wants to do is curl up on the floor moaning 'No more pagers, no more pagers' all night."   
Leela returned at that point looking a lot less terminally ill and carrying a bottle of Ethanull, which she passed to Fry. He accepted the powerful brew of anti-intoxicants and stimulants with a heartfelt gurgle of thanks.   
They followed the professor into the employees' lounge, where a small man was sitting on the sofa watching TV and eating a cup of nonfat dole yeast. The thing that struck Leela most immediately about the man was the fact that no one could ever forget his face, but only because no one would ever notice it in the first place. The man seemed enveloped in an almost tangible aura of averageness. He was slightly chubby, had brown hair that was just starting to recede and a scraggly mustache and goatee. He looked up from the screen as they approached. "Fry, Leela, meet Irwin Drake, professor of, um, I forget what... We've been watching the tank fight while waiting for your return."   
"Xenoarchaeology", Drake supplied. "Pleased to meet you." He took a closer look at Fry. "Hey, I recognize you. You're that freezer jockey from the 1900s. I wrote an article last year on your case."   
"Really? Neat." Fry sounded pleased.   
"That, and you were the guy dancing naked on top of the scoreboard after the fight." Fry examined his memory, did a discreet underwear check, and then conceded the possibility. He did seem to recall having been a Vegas showgirl at some point...   
The professor continued. "Your job is to ferry Professor Drake to an archaeological dig in the Chuthrupt system and back, along with a crate of pressurized radiation suits. The Terran Smithsonian has agreed to provide the suits in exchange for having a representative on the site, and they're also hiring us at the standard rate for the whole next week. Now load up that crate and get going!"   
Back in the hangar, Fry and Drake helped Bender to his feet while Leela opened the cargo bay doors and got the power winch warmed up. "Come on, Bender, rise and shine. We've got a delivery to go on."   
"What, again?" He wobbled crazily on his feet, speech slurred. "Thazza damn outrage! I'm gonna call my union rep, jus' as soon as I rememmer what my job is." Still muttering angrily, he let himself be led up the ramp. 

* * * 

"Oh, come on. You've gotta be fakin'," Fry griped as the small man shuffled out of the head looking like a corpse that wished it could die all over again. "How do you get spacesick in a ship with artificial gravity?"   
Drake attempted a rueful grin that came out looking more than a little froglike. "Oh, I'm sure it's, uh, purely psycosoma-matic," he said, hiccupping slightly. "Probably related to my fear of heights." He gestured at the view out of the forward portal, adding "-and just look at _that_ for a height," while carefully avoiding doing so himself.   
"Well, you won't have to look at it much longer," Leela announced as she entered the bridge and took her seat at the helm. "We're into their inner system now, and we ought to be landing in twenty, thirty minutes." The alien sun was now visible as a rapidly expanding disk.   
Sort of a dark yellow, Fry thought. Almost orange. Squinting, he could just make out the brown speck dead ahead that was their destination. "So, what do you know about this place... Chussup, it's called?"   
"Chuthrupt." Leela said the planet's name with an odd click at the end, not far off the natives' pronunciation. "Well, I heard that they were involved in an interstellar war about two centuries ago. A bad one; their planet's ecology was just about wrecked. A lot of people say it put a real streak of paranoia into them as a species, too, but I think of it more as determination. I mean, their civilization was practically wiped out, and yet by eighty years later they had a space navy as big as that of the entire DOOP today. Plus, they keep their whole fleet right on the cutting edge, technologically."   
"So, um, they're not part of the DOOP?" Fry sounded vaguely uneasy. Drake, lying on the couch, just made a small noise in his throat and went on trying to will himself to die.   
"No, casual allies. They might have joined at some point, but I think there's some membership requirement or other they don't meet, and they refuse to change. Besides, they've got a ferociously independent attitude, and a military much more than adequate to back it up.   
As Leela talked, Fry became aware of hundreds of nearly invisible blue sparks moving through space off in the distance ahead of them. He realized that those must be the fusion exhaust of countless ships, visible even at interplanetary distances. One ship, a silvery sphere with a blunt wedge protruding from each flank, was growing in their view slightly off to port.   
As they watched it slowly expand, Bender entered the bridge from the galley below. "Well, food's on. Hope everybody likes protein briquettes... whoa, MOMMA that thing is big."   
Fry wondered how bender could tell with nothing nearby to compare it to, and no visible surface features -until the ship had swollen in apparent size to the point where it almost blotted out their view entirely and he suddenly noticed tiny specks in evenly-spaced longitudinal bands all over its hull. Some were dark, some lit feebly. Portholes. Assuming that these creatures were about as tall as an average human, the lumbering battlewagon Nimbus would have made a serviceable hood ornament for the alien ship.   
As the others watched the vast ship's passage silently and uneasily, Drake cracked an eyelid to see what the eerie lack of fuss was about. After a moment, he smiled through his nausea. "Chill, folks. It's just a bulk freighter. Old one, too; nobody builds hyperdrive ships that big nowadays."   
"Hm?" Fry tore his attention away from the huge vessel for a moment.   
"Yeah. Wrote an article on ship designs over the course of history for 'Interplanetary Archaeology' a few years back, when they dredged the _Discovery_ out of the Sigsbee Deep. Most species like warships that are long, sleek, aerodynamic. Phallic symbols, basically."   
"Well, how do you know that's not a phallic symbol to these critters?" Bender pointed out, reasonably. "You know, Fry, like that Denebian senator that thought you were making lewd gestures at him with your hair."   
"Twenty bucks says Amy finds out within three days," Leela quipped with an air of amused contempt. Amy snorted but didn't look up from her copy of Cosmopolitoid.   
Drake said, dryly, "You're on, lady. I've met these 'critters'."   
The comm interrupted at that point with a polite "boop-boop-boop" sound, followed by a voice that sounded like it belonged on a rhinoceros with bronchitis. "Light cargo ship PXS-01A, Planet Express, central traffic here. Confirm identity, please."   
Leela poked the Respond button. "PXS-01A here. Go ahead, central traffic."   
"Greetings, PXS-01A. Proceed to landing zone at nav beacon 843-Green." A blinking marker appeared on the navigational display, and Leela reset the autopilot accordingly.   
"Huh. Looks like we're going to be landing on a moon. Shame; I was kind of looking forward to seeing the planet itself."   
Fry wasn't so sure about its being a shame, and said so. Chuthrupt was now plainly visible, and it reminded him of an egg that someone had started to crack, then changed their mind and taken a blowtorch to instead. Almost the entire surface had an oily, sickly-gray sheen to it, broken in many places by canyons that made Valles Marineris look like a drainage ditch. The chasms looked even more startling on the nighttime half of the planet, where their molten floors glowed a hellish red. By far the most striking feature of Chuthrupt, however, was a band of green-and-brown vegetation about thirty degrees wide which extended all the way between the North and South poles of the planet. As far as Fry could tell, it was the only region of the planet that even approached "inhabitable".   
Four minutes later, when the planet's moon came into view around the curve of the planet, two thoughts impressed themselves heavily on the consciousness of each member of the crew: _'Chuthrupt doesn't look so bad after all'_ and _'We're landing on THAT?'_   
The moon was a cratered nightmare. It was roughly 1000 kilometers in diameter, and had obviously been bombarded with enough gigatonnage to wipe out every living thing on the surface of an average-sized terrestrial world twice over. Fortunately, though, there had obviously never been anything living on the moon's surface; it was an artifact.   
Looking at the blasted geologic strata of armor plating and mountain ranges of splintered support beams, Fry couldn't help comparing it to the finale of Star Wars. The Death Star, though, got off pretty easy compared to the treatment this thing had received; just one quick annihilating blast. Chuthrupt's moon looked like it had been tortured to death.   
He turned to ask Drake for the story behind the monstrous world they were approaching, but the archaeologist had retreated to the head again, gulping slightly. Peeved, Fry turned back to the front, resolving to ask someone on the surface once they were down. 

* * * 

Watching the Thrupp unpack the cargo, Leela reflected that no matter how far you've traveled or how much you've seen, there's always something waiting somewhere to startle you. It was one thing to be told during the professor's briefing that they had evolved from a gregarious vegetarian reptiloid similar to certain terrestrial dinosaurs; she had had an ironic mental image of a bunch of big, slothful stegosaur-men on an archaeological dig. Somehow, you always expect intelligent species to be fairly puny and defenseless; otherwise, why bother evolving brains? Look at early Man; a bunch of flabby, balding, walking embryonic gorillas. Clever, but otherwise Smilidon chow. Incomplete.   
The Thrupp, on the other hand, were a finished product. Director Hrauggh, the average-sized male who seemed to be in charge of the dig, was a 2.5 meter tall, half ton mountain of muscle and blades. He was roughly humanoid, with leathery gray skin that would stop a switchblade and a long prehensile tail. He also had two thick, multi- jointed limbs growing out of his upper back which arched forward over his shoulders to terminate in visciously curved bony hooks. A much larger, tusk-like blade extending almost a meter out from each elbow appeared to be solidly fixed to the bone of the upper arm. His broad wedge-shaped head was his most dinosaurish feature, adorned as it was with a low, triceratops-like armored crest which must have protected the neck from above before they evolved into bipeds. The females present looked largely the same, but they tended to be shorter and broader, and had bony club-like knobs on the ends of their tails.   
All in all, one deadly looking lizard, and impressive as hell. She could tell Fry was awed too, but for different reasons. To Fry, alien was alien, and a talking pile of space-tapioca was just as fascinating as a 400-kilo biological bulldozer. A real born xenophile; Fry was just one of those lucky people who thrived on the newfangled, the exotic, even the full-on bizarre, and who adapted readily to life in the weirdest corners of the universe. It was the one trait of Fry's that Leela genuinely admired and even envied a little. _Shame about the rest of him_, she thought.   
Bender, too, was impressed; he had resolved not to even think about trying to swipe anything.   
Drake came bounding up to the foot of the steps where she, Amy and Bender were waiting, moving like a kangaroo in the miniscule gravity of the moon and grinning like an idiot. "It's amazing," the little archeologist gushed. "We're standing on the biggest artifact the universe has ever seen, and God only knows how old it is! Can you even begin to imagine the society it took to produce this?"   
Ktepph, one of the Thrupp researchers passing out radiation suits to his compatriots, paused and turned to look down at Drake. "We've got our theories about them, yes," he rumbled coldly.   
Seeing Drakes exuberance falter, Leela redirected the subject. "Have you seen Fry recently?" she asked. "I didn't want him to wander off too far, so I told him his suit only held an hour's worth of air. That was three hours ago." In reality, she knew, his rebreather would keep him going for a week; plenty of time for him to find something real to die of.   
"Oh, he's fine. There's nothing on the surface that could kill you as long as you keep your suit on, and even if he fell down a crater, DOOP spacesuits are all radiation shielded. When I saw him last, he was asking Hrauggh if he'd get a chance to go below." He paused; two Thrupp were starting to weld the base of a prefab airlock shed to the ground over the spot designated as the first dig site, while a third stood by with a plasma drill. "Actually, I think I could arrange a trip down for all of you, if you'd like. You'll have to promise to keep out from underfoot, of course." He chortled at his pun.   
"Sounds fun," Amy said, and bender agreed. Fry reappeared at that point, trotting out from behind a huge vehicle that looked like the bastard offspring of a hippopotamus and a forklift.   
"So Irwin," he called jubilantly, "What's the story behind this thing we're on? Is it some kind of space station, or just a moon somebody built a dome around?" Leela thought about letting him have it for wandering off, but it wouldn't do any good. Besides, she wanted to hear Drake' answer.   
"Actually, it's a starship. Most Thrupp believe it was manned, but a lot of scientists argue that it was purely automated; what an ancient writer once called a Berserker. Briefly, it showed up in their solar system about two centuries ago, and moved into orbit around Chuthrupt without responding to any attempt to contact it. A week later, it employed some kind of beam weapon to begin burning the crust right off the mantle just like peeling an orange. Still, they managed to stop it, but not until it had destroyed more than nine-tenths of the planet's surface and all but fifty million Thrupp out of a population of three billion. The director knows the story better than I," he concluded. Glancing over, he saw that the Thrupp with the plasma drill was just exiting the airlock shed, followed by the two welders, who were now carrying a molten-edged square slab of armor plate two meters on a side. Even in microgravity, the ground vibrated underfoot when they chucked the slab aside.   
Off in the center of the camp, the director had been addressing the assembled crowd of radiation-suited aliens. He now stepped aside and a taller, leaner Thrupp whose blades had been honed to wicked points and polished to a glow took the floor and began to speak.   
"That's the military specialist, Tagguth," Drake said, and then began translating for the crew. "'Watch out down there, people. The tunnels are filled with breathable air, the first real evidence we have encountered that the ship was manned...'" At this, the crowd stirred slightly and an uneasy muttering was heard, but Tagguth paid it no mind. "'...so I want everyone in teams of two or more at all times. No one is to break radio contact. Report any indication that any of the ship's systems are operational at once. And remember, whatever built the ship might have a much higher tolerance for radiation than us; most lifeforms do. It is just barely possible that something is still alive down there. If you run into an organism, do not approach it! Get back to the surface fast and tell your co-workers to do the same. A team of capture specialists is standing by on the Choftareph.'" At Leela's inquisitive glance, Drake pointed to a blocky metallic shape floating above the moon's horizon. "Their flagship. 'A live alien would be valuable beyond any measure. An intact memory module or printed book might prove even better. A star chart would be the ultimate prize. I don't want anyone here to forget why we came here, not for a moment. Now get down there, and good luck.'" 

* * * 

It was fully five stir-crazy days before the crew got their first peek under the surface. Fry was up in the dorsal turret stargazing and relaxing in his briefs when Leela called him over the intercom. Amy had told him how by turning the power to the Tokamak tube's constriction field down a bit and setting a pail of water on the exposed tube surface behind the gunner's seat, you could get a nice steam-room effect going. He didn't know just how many neutrons he was soaking up in the course of his fusion-powered schvitz, but then, Fry usually preferred not to know things that would just distress him.   
"I'm in the turret," he replied. There was no immediate response, but a minute or so later the gunner's seat hummed and lowered itself into the main corridor, where Leela was staring incredulously. Sitting half-naked in a bucket seat suspended from the ceiling of a spaceship slowly filling with steam, it occurred to Fry that he probably ought to feel a little foolish.   
"What in God's name could you possibly think you're doing?" asked Leela, more to herself than him. "No, don't bother. Just put some clothes on and get into your pressure suit. Drake just called; they're letting us have a peek below now."   
"Oh. Okay, cool!" He hopped down and sped off to alert Amy and Bender.   
They were met at the foot of the ramp by Irwin Drake and Director Hrauggh, who was recognizable by the broad blue rank stripes painted across his rad-suit's chest. "Ah, greetings, Planet Express crew," the gigantic alien called. "We're going to be going down entry point four today. We think this area might have been the crew quarters; it seems to consist of a lot of narrow hallways and tiny, identical rooms. Most of it is too small for one of us to squeeze through, but a human could easily manage."   
"This really is the most amazing thing to happen in interplanetary archaeology in decades," Drake interjected happily, as the rest of them checked their rebreathers and turned on their boot magnets. "The discovery of a pressurized complex on the moon ship- I mean, it's just the biggest thing since they found the Hoffa Space Pod on Luna."   
"So Hrerg... Hoorg... Director," Fry said as they hiked across the iron plain towards the fourth dig site, "how did your people manage to kill this, um, ship anyway?"   
The old Thrupp glanced down at Fry, his expression hard to read through the silvered sun-guard on his helmet. After a moment, he spoke. "Well, we were lucky as far as timing went. Two years before, we did not have any useful spacecraft, and a few years later the last of our nuclear weapons would have been scrapped. It happened a hundred and thirty-one years ago. Our years, that is, I think yours are shorter.   
"Our governments tried everything anyone could think of to contact the ship as it approached, without success. By the time it opened up with its weapon and began skinning Chuthrupt alive, one of those governments' space agencies had already developed a last-ditch defense plan. We had one big ship already built; it had been intended to explore the nearest planets of our solar system. When the attack came, there was barely enough time to outfit it with one backpack nuke and send it up before the arc of destruction swept across the launch facility, but a radio observatory on the far side of the planet was able to contact the pilot a few times before the end."   
They were passing a transparent, inflated bubble the size of a circus tent. Looking inside, the crew could see that the floor was covered in rows of miscellaneous artifacts, from shapeless bits of torn alloys and polymers, to things that could only be hand tools. About a dozen Thrupp were walking up and down the aisles, attaching numbered tags to objects and taking notes on small handheld data pads. One item in particular was startling; three meters away on the other side of the bubble wall Fry could see a perfectly ordinary, comfortable looking plush armchair with suction cups for feet. Despite the warmth of his heated suit, he felt a chill breeze down the back of his neck. A glance at the rest of the group told him that Amy and Leela had seen the same thing.   
"Choftareph was one of the engineers who had helped design the navigation system on the surveyor ship, and was the only Thrupp at the launch facility when the enemy attacked who had any idea how to pilot it. For some reason, he was not shot down on approach and landed safely, burning a hole into the moon ship's armor first with his thrusters. Since the beam was currently busy chewing up what was then the uninhabited Gray Ocean, it was decided that he would have to find something vital-looking and place the bomb with a fifteen-minute timed delay, then get out fast. We lost radio contact with him when he went down the hole, and only heard from him two more times, very briefly. The first time he was commenting that he knew an antimatter accelerator when he saw one. The second time, he was saying: '-surrounded me. They really are demons.'   
"All we know for sure about what Choftareph's bomb did to the moon ship is that over the course of the next few seconds the electromagnetic emissions of the ship rose by a factor of millions and then died out completely, along with its weapon."   
They had arrived at an airlock shed. Hrauggh paused outside the door and turned toward the group. "Seventeen years later, radio emissions were detected from the moon ship which could not be accounted for by the science team on its surface. They evacuated, and Chuthrupt's entire rebuilt nuclear arsenal was used to make sure the ship never came back to life again."   
At the bottom of the hole, they shut off their suit radios and switched over to their external speakers. It made conversation a lot easier not to hear everyone else's voice coming from the same point an inch above the top of your head. The thought of being surrounded by breathable air again was comforting, but the ambient radiation level made removing your suit a very bad idea just the same.   
Agent Tagguth and two of the archaeological team met them at the foot of the hole as they dropped in, floating down like dandelion seeds under the miniscule gravity to connect with a CLICK to the floorplates, where their boot magnets held them steady.   
"You are here. Good," the military specialist said tersely. Up close, Leela could see that Tagguth had almost fluorescent green eyes, unlike the olive or brown ones of most of the other Thrupp. His rad-suit also varied from that of his colleagues, having been altered to expose his elbow blades and shoulder hooks while still forming an airtight seal with the polished bone. "We cannot fit in small spaces, so I want you to go into these rooms and bring out objects, tools. Clothes would be very good. If you see a body, tell us. Do not touch it."   
"Wait, Wait... You're saying," Bender interrupted, "that you brought us down here for lootin'?"   
Tagguth shrugged. "I do not speak all of English. If looting is, then yes. Only do not break anything."   
"Woo Hoo!" Bender trotted off down a narrow hallway, chanting "Loo-ting, loo-ting..." with gusto. Leela noticed as he left that all of the corridors were lit faintly by the original lighting, and asked the female Thrupp archaeologist about the fact.   
"Yes," she explained, "much of the lighting equipment and wiring is still intact, but we have a generator on the surface supplying the power. All complex electronic systems were ruined when the bombs went off."   
The four Express crew and Drake fanned out through the maze of cramped rooms, checking every corner. It turned out to be a lot less exciting than Fry had hoped; just a bunch of dingy, identical rooms. Each contained a small chest of drawers and a dusty cot. Drake suggested that the dust might be left over from a decayed corpse, but Hrauggh pointed out that the radiation would keep anything organic from decaying very far, as no environmental microbes were left alive.   
Fry did find a corpse once; a creature was lying under one of the cots which looked very much like a four-legged blue roach with a glittering, faceted eye taking up most of the volume of its head. Unfortunately, it was clearly not the species which had built the ship, as it was less than a centimeter long and had no hands. Still, a great deal of fuss was made about the discovery of the first bio-specimen larger than fossilized bacteria.   
Also, Drake found an abandoned gizmo in one of the chests of drawers which could only have been a laptop computer. The keys were fewer than on a human's keyboard and unlabelled, and nothing could be done to turn the computer on. The EMPs from the nukes had seen to that.   
Three hours later, the Thrupp were picking through the small pile of odds and ends retrieved from the rooms so far, and Amy, Leela and Drake were still wandering aimlessly through the corridors rechecking each other's turf. Bender was working on a case of single-malt he had been storing in his torso, and Fry was considering removing his helmet long enough for a shot or two, when Amy called over their suit radios. "Hey, everybody! I'm not really sure where I am... Um, it looks like a closet or something. Anyway, I just found something! It's floppy and red, and there's a round... oh. It's a spacesuit."   
All four Thrupp tensed, not breathing. There was utter silence for almost a minute, and then Drake's voice came onto the radio. "Everyone should get back to the entry chamber at once. Amy, you too, and bring that suit with you."   
Leela and Drake made it back in under a minute, and Amy showed up five minutes later with her find just as the rest of the group feared the floor was going to collapse under Hrauggh's nervous pacing. She carried a folded up garment made out of what looked like red foam rubber and a gunmetal-gray helmet. The helmet's purpose was not readily obvious, as it was plainly not designed to hold air in. There was a loose fitting fold-up tinted faceplate in the front and a half dozen thin slots cut in the rear for ventilation.   
As Tagguth took the helmet and began a closer inspection of it, the two assistant Thrupp unfolded the red garment. They moved slowly, careful not to rip the dry rotted suit material, and when they were done Drake whistled softly in surprise. It was a completely ordinary looking jumpsuit with several large, baggy pockets. Any of a dozen average-sized humanoid species could have worn it comfortably. As Hrauggh and his assistants excitedly began setting up a holocamera to record every detail of the suit, Drake absent-mindedly took out a cigarette, twisted the self-lighting cap and bumped its filter against his faceplate. He paused for a moment, then sheepishly passed it off to Bender before speaking.   
"Wow. This is just... I mean, hot DAMN!" He clapped Amy on the back, grinning like a maniac. "We're gonna be in, well screw all the journals, we're gonna be in history texts! Carter, Jones, Drake. You know, there's so much we can learn from this suit. Just how much gravity they were used to, maybe some hair or skin flakes, we could have the key to their whole genetic... Tagguth, what's wrong?"   
The Thrupp soldier was peering intently into the open face of the helmet, eyes wide. With a sudden motion, he hooked a gloved finger up into the top of the helmet and pulled a small metal swingarm down.   
The arm snapped into place in front of where the wearer's face would be. Attached to its end was what looked like a night-vision targeting scope.   
The scope had exactly one eyepiece.   
Dead center.   
The holocamera dropped slowly out of Thrupp hands gone suddenly boneless. Fry gasped, and Bender bit through the neck of his bottle. Drake blurted out "What in hell- " as Hrauggh whirled about to stare mutely at Leela, his face in a rictus of fear, loathing and disbelief.   
She was backing very slowly away, transfixed by the helmet. Her face had gone corpse-gray, and she seemed to be trying to speak. She took a gluey step back. "No," she breathed. "They couldn't have been... it wasn't..." Another step.   
Tagguth whipped his hand up to point accusingly at her face.   
"EEYREEGROOOH!" 

* * * 

"You know Fry, the nicest part of our business," Bender was saying when the two armed Thrupp guards returned Drake to their cell, "is learning how to say 'seize them' in all kinda different languages. I think this makes twenty-seven for me, you've probably got more."   
"Uh-huh." Fry wasn't paying much attention; he was getting worried about Leela. While everyone else had been struggling to get loose and protesting loudly back in the antechamber, she had seemed almost catatonic from the shock. Now she was just sitting in the corner staring vaguely at her feet, all of the life and hope gone out of her face, and he knew that fear alone could not have done this to the toughest person he had ever known.   
For as long as Leela could remember, she had felt an overpowering need to belong somewhere; as a youngster, she had wished pathetically to have two eyes like her classmates, to be able to fit in with the crowd. Not to forever remain "the cyclops". As she matured, she had come to accept her aesthetic quirk by cultivating a fierce sense of self-sufficiency, which had caused her friends worry at times when she truly was vulnerable. Still, she had never stopped hoping that there was a world somewhere on which she could be accepted as a perfectly normal person; Brannigan's piggish fascination with her as "exotic" held no more appeal to her than most people's reflexive revulsion. Alcazar's callous manipulation of her desire for kindred had wounded her much more deeply than she had cared to admit.   
And now her lifelong question had been answered. _Yes, Leela, your people are out there. The ones you've always known in your heart would be there to accept you with open, loving minds. And they're a bunch of God-damned murdering monsters._   
For a moment her lips tightened and Fry thought she was going to start crying, hoped desperately that she would show any kind of emotion other than this horrible emptiness, deadness... but the moment passed.   
Drake had taken a seat against the wall opposite the laser grid which separated them from the room's only door, his face resting miserably in his hands. Their helmets had been taken and their pressure suits carefully punctured in about a dozen places, but at least they had been put in a carefully radiation-shielded room.   
"Well?" Amy asked impatiently. Unlike the others, she had worked herself into a frantically pacing nervous wreck over the last twelve hours.   
His voice was muffled but clearly audible. "No direct threats. Just had me describe everything I know about Leela, where I met her and when, everything she's said or done in my presence since we first met, whether she's ever told me anything about her people-" Here he paused, having seen her flinch at that phrase as if struck. "No threats though. As far as I can tell, they're going to let the rest of us go in a few days. We're not worth holding."   
"And Leela?" Fry sounded bitter. "What do they think they're going to gain by keeping her? She's never even seen another cyclops; she couldn't tell them anything useful if she wanted to... or even if they used torture, or brainwashing."   
"They don't know that for sure, though," Drake said almost gently. "And it can't hurt them to try. And they can learn her biochemistry, use tissue samples to develop biological warfare agents for use against other cyclopses. Plus, it's possible to determine the exact spectrum of the sun any creature evolved under, but the procedure involves careful dissection of the eye and forebrain."   
"Well, how about the DOOP," asked Bender, agitated. "I mean, she is a citizen, isn't she? Ain't the DOOP supposed to stand up for its citizens?"   
The archaeologist grimaced unhappily. "Don't count on it. The Thrupp are determined to hold on to Leela for experimentation, and DOOP's not about to use military force in a rescue mission. Nothing loses you votes faster than upsetting diplomatic relations; In fact, I'd be willing to bet that everyone over there's still loudly denying any knowledge of her species and working feverishly to bury the records of her government job. I doubt anyone in the Senate's got the grapes to even lodge a formal complaint."   
In the long silence that followed, Amy stopped her pacing and slowly sank to the floor. Finally, she spoke. "Jesus... Leela, I'm sorry. I should have checked out that helmet first thing; shoulda tried to find out what I was dealing with..." She started sobbing softly.   
"Oh, crap, not crying," Bender exclaimed uncomfortably. "Look, so you got Leela doomed. It was an accident already; it's not your fault you're a cretin. Ah, jeez, I said STOP crying! You're gonna screw up your makeup," he added hopefully.   
Still sobbing, Amy took out her makeup case and began dabbing ineffectually at her mascara, ruining it further. Fry was starting to wonder how she had planned on touching up her face through a pressure helmet, when he noticed with a start that Leela had come partly out of her miserable stupor and was staring intently at Amy... At, he realized, Amy's makeup case.   
"Let me see that," she said suddenly. Startled, Amy sniffled a bit but handed it over. Leela flipped it open and studied the mirror for a long moment. At last she announced quietly, "I think I might be able to get us out of here. Amy, I'm guessing this thing cost a lot, yes?" Amy confirmed it with a bewildered look on her face. "Well, then, I'm sorry for this." With that, Leela stood, walked over to the laser grid, and carefully pushed the mirror into one of the beams at an angle. There was a puff of acrid smoke as the laser bit into the plastic rim of the case, but the mirror itself held.   
"Everyone get down," she said, and there was a mad rush to comply, as her fellow inmates started to see her plan. First, she swung the blazing thread of light over to the room's closed door. Working quickly but thoroughly, she proceeded to play the beam over the top and side seams of the door. Metal bubbled and ran like molten wax to solidify again in seconds, fusing door and frame. After slagging the hinges too for good measure, she turned the beam on the far wall of their cell and began slowly cutting out a circular chunk of the wall. By the time she was halfway finished, alarmed voices could be heard from out in the hallway. Someone pounded briefly on the door, but gave up quickly. There was quiet for a moment, and then the entire room rang like a gong as the door bulged inward in a bas relief of a Thrupp bootprint, fully half a meter long and nearly as broad.   
"Come on, hurry, Leela!" Fry was shouting. She said nothing, but sweat was beading on her forehead and she was having to grip the mirror with both hands to keep the beam steady.   
Another seismic blow shook the room and the door shed flakes of still-cooling metal. Leela completed her circle and Drake stood to deliver a firm kick to the center of the outlined disk... and the wall held. "Again!" he yelled, face distorted with fear and frustration.   
The door split down the middle, but remained anchored at the sides. Leela started to rapidly trace over her previous cut, and halfway through there was a groan of tearing metal on the far side of the wall. The disk rotated several degrees in its hole, dripping glowing metal from the edges, and this time Drake's kick punched it neatly out like a cookie cutter. It sailed end-over-end in the feeble gravity to stick to the far wall of a darkened corridor beyond.   
Two enormous hands worked their way in through the crack in the door and folded the halves back along their new seams as effortlessly as opening a set of window shutters, and Leela found herself staring through bars of coherent ruby light at Tagguth's astonished visage. She hesitated only the briefest of moments before swinging the laser back toward the doorway, but the Thrupp warrior was much quicker than he looked and had already ducked behind the wall. Still, she kept the doorway covered while the rest of the crew piled out of the escape hole, and was just looking for anything else that needed burning when the laser flickered and died on her. The mirror was still hanging in the air when she went through the hole in a headlong dive. She felt Fry grab her shoulder midair and haul her sideways, moments before a tremendous radiation-suited arm lashed out of the hole behind her. Leela paused just long enough to reassure herself that Tagguth could not in fact squeeze through, and then she was off, running with the others as fast as her legs and lungs would permit.   
This corridor was totally unfamiliar to any of them, although it had to be within mere meters of the living quarters they had explored thoroughly the previous day. It was higher, wider, and less well-lit, and the few rooms they saw appeared to be intended as storage space. Huge metal-and-plastic supply crates were stacked in most of them, and Drake felt a momentary pang at the knowledge that he would never get to examine their contents when the science teams arrived. He wondered briefly if the Smithsonian was going to make him cough up Express's fee for the extra time they had been delayed, decided that they probably would, and made a mental note of where he would tell the board of directors to shove the fee when they did.   
An hour after their escape, having decided that their pursuers were kilometers away, the crew stopped to rest in the shadow of a three story tall dead Tokamak tube suspended from the ceiling of a cavernous room. The entire outer rim of the colossal metal torus had melted and been blasted outward when an EMP had fried its failsafe mechanisms, and only one light fixture under the center of the tube had survived to cast the dim pool of light that the five huddled around now like a campfire.   
"So Leela," Drake began, "You seem to be both the brains and the brawn of this outfit, so-"   
"Hey! So what does that make me?" asked Fry.   
"The flab. So just-"   
"And me?" this from Bender.   
"The diseased liver. And you," he said nodding toward Amy, "would appear to be the appendix. My question was, just what is your plan for getting us out of here?"   
"Well, I hadn't really thought past the bit with the lasers, but I'd like to have seen you get us half this far," she snapped. "At least we're out of that cell and away from those reptiles now. Plus, I'm not currently being either interrogated or dissected at the moment, which I happen to regard as a pretty damn good start!"   
"Allright, allright, everybody chill for a second," Fry interrupted. "All he's saying, Leela, is that we need to get to the ship somehow, and our suits are never gonna hold air again."   
"Bender could do it," Amy piped up. "It's not like vacuum's going to bother him, and as long as nobody's guarding the ship..."   
Bender shifted his weight awkwardly from foot to foot. "Uh, I'd give it a shot, sure, but I really don't have a clue how to fly that thing, and they'd probably shoot the crap outta me the second I tried."   
"Hm." Leela pondered for a long moment. "Well... I suppose he could get to the ship and come back here with the spare suits, and then we could all make a break for it at once. Which reminds me;" she added, "what's left of these suits may be keeping most of the radiation out, but if we don't get out of here in the next day or so then we might as well not even bother trying."   
There was an uneasy silence as each of the four organic beings present became conscious of the mild but itchy "sunburn" sensation that had been slowly growing over the past hour. Already, Leela knew, they had soaked up their allowance of gamma rays and neutrons for the next year or so, and death by radiation poisoning was one of the average space pilot's worst dreads.   
Drake stood up. "I guess that settles it, then. Let's go." 

* * * 

They had been wandering through the tunnels of the complex for more than four more hours before Leela's wristcomp picked up a blip from the ship's navigational beacon, and now they were headed up a long, steeply sloping hallway with a grated metal floor. Under the grating, a single fluorescent blue tube light ran the entire hundred meter length of the corridor, creating a weirdly eerie atmosphere. Fry, at the back of the column, kept looking nervously over his shoulder at the tunnel behind. While he knew that there was no way for a Thrupp to fit through the narrow corridor, it was impossible to shake the feeling of being watched by something. Aside from the few rooms that had housed volatile power equipment when the nukes went off, everything just looked so new, so sterile, that he could not help wondering if someone was still around keeping house.   
And in fact it was sterile, he knew; not a single bacterium had survived the centuries of hard radiation, and the microbes his group was shedding would all be dead within hours. Once, through a row of thick silica glass windows along one wall of a corridor, they had looked into what could only have been a meat locker. The glass had been room temperature, but the huge sides of alien meat hanging from clamps on the ceiling showed no evidence of spoilage at all. They had looked much like terrestrial beef carcasses, but with a radically different skeletal structure. Also, cuts had been removed from them seemingly at random with some tool that had carved pits in the meat like an ice cream scoop.   
At the top of the hallway, they went through a bulky metal door that slid smoothly aside at a push, and found themselves at the bottom of a deep conical pit. The walls of the pit went up to the height of a six story building, and were dotted with various-sized openings that had probably once been ventilation ducts. While the five of them could just crowd together on the floor at its bottom, the mouth of the hole opened out to a diameter of about five meters. A handrail was visible encircling the pit, and above that the framework of a greenhouse-sized glass dome that gave them a clear view of the stars.   
And off to one side of the dome, just barely in their field of view, they could see the sharp edge of the Planet Express ship's left wing.   
"Before you start celebrating," Leela said at Fry's hoarse whoop of triumph, "remember how many big glass domes we could see from the ship when we left."   
Fry paused. "Um... none. Damn. I see what you mean."   
Amy looked puzzled. "They moved the ship?" she asked, worried.   
"And they may still be watching it." Leela looked desperately unhappy. "And there's nothing we can do about it if they are. Ready to go, Bender?"   
"God, yes. If I don't get a drink soon..."   
"I'll buy you a whole case of Bulletproof Bob's Bourbon when we get out of this. Now, once you stretch up there, look around for an airlock. I doubt you'll find one, so you'll just have to knock a hole in the glass to get out. In which case," she went on ignoring Drake's pained expression, "the rest of us will be waiting back in the tunnel. The doors looked like they were designed to be air- " She had just turned back to glance at the tunnel entrance again, and her vocal cords were no longer working properly. Without making the slightest sound at all, the door had slid tightly shut behind them. Drake and Amy tried frantically for minute to pull it back open, but it was locked firmly in place and there was no visible knob or release present. Leela looked both horrified and indignant at once. "Sweet Jesus," she exclaimed, "what the hell are we supposed to do now?"   
The question became much more urgent a moment later when Bender exploded like a garbage can with a grenade in it.   
Adrenaline enabled Leela to follow the events of the next few seconds in a sort of slow-motion nightmare haze. She found herself lying on her back midair, having been knocked loose from the floorplates by the force of the blast. Something connected to the sole of one of her magnetic boots with a TICK sound; a curved, rectangular panel of metal. Bender's door. She could see his head for a moment, spinning end over end above her and still rising fast, and wondered vaguely whether or not it would hit the dome with enough force to break the glass. Vacuum might be easy on the ears, she reflected; she wasn't sure how much of the ringing in her ears came from the blast and how much was actually the shrill, endless screaming coming from Amy. Then she became aware of another shape falling towards her.   
A Thrupp was descending the pit, fast, feet first. It was just pushing a new blernsball-sized shell into a handheld launcher that looked a lot like an oversized flaregun. It passed by her with its back turned, and continued down towards Fry and Amy below. Drake was nowhere to be seen.   
Amy was still floating in the microgravity, spinning slowly end over end as her limbs flailed wildly for purchase, when an elephantine foot landed on her chest and pushed her into the ground. The boot's powerful magnetic field gripped the floorplates firmly right through Amy's ribcage, and her scream terminated with a wheezing squeak and a sickening crackle.   
Fry's boots had come into contact with the wall of the pit and he was now standing parallel to the ground, his head at the same height as that of the Thrupp but tilted at a ninety-degree angle. From the expression on his face, Leela knew that he was perilously close to coming completely unglued. He snatched a tube-like robot arm out of the air and began whaling on the back of the Thrupp's triangular helmet with all his might, gibbering in fear and rage. Startled but unhurt, the Thrupp whirled around and caught Fry with a backhand swipe that knocked him completely out of his boots, which stayed stuck to the wall absurdly.   
Fry caromed off of the wall, hit the other side of the pit feet first, and immediately launched himself at the back of his foe's head again. Clinging on, spiderlike, he started smashing the iron stump of Bender's severed arm into the faceplate of the Thrupp helmet before him, which caved in with a muffled SCRUTCH sound. Momentarily blinded, the Thrupp made a vain effort to snatch him off of the back of its neck, but could not get a good grip on him. All reason had deserted the normally meek Fry; his eyes burned with mixed terror and psychotic glee. For a few seconds it looked like he was actually going to batter right through the faceplate and alien skull beneath... then its two flexible, bone-tipped hooks curled forward over him, scorpion-like, and buried their tips in his shoulders through his pressure suit. Fry snapped back to sanity just long enough to yelp "LeelAAAUGH!!!" before being ripped off of the Thrupp's neck and slammed into the ground like a sack of potatoes. He didn't even bounce.   
Leela found herself slowly drifting downward past one of the duct openings, and put out a hand to catch the edge. _Just barely large enough_, she thought blearily. Glancing back down again, she saw the huge alien poke a finger through its faceplate and peel away the gummy, opaque ellipse of ruined safety glass. It turned, and two emerald green eyes met hers. Tagguth snarled and leaped.   
Finally starting to panic, Leela scrambled inside and had made it about two meters down the narrow duct when a gigantic hand closed on her ankle with crushing strength. Leela gasped as the bones in her foot ground against one another and tried feebly to twist free. As the hand started to pull her out of the tunnel backwards, she began frantically tearing zippers open, and a moment later Tagguth found himself clutching an empty, ruined radiation suit.   
Leela was closing on a bend in the duct when an explosion behind her knocked her on her stomach. She lay stunned and deafened for a moment, wondering why they weren't trying to bring her in alive anymore, until she remembered Drake's lecture on the Thrupps' plan for her back in the cell. _They're through pissing around now_, a little voice in her head was warning her. _Capturing you in one piece would be nice, but all they really need is your head._   
As she struggled weakly to lift herself to her hands and knees, something hot brushed by her ear from behind, traveling fast. She had just barely enough time to guess what it was before flame filled the tunnel ahead of her. This time, as flying debris lacerated her skin, all she could hear was a thin ringing in her skull, and peering through the smoke and tears of pain she could see that the duct walls ahead had been blown apart like cardboard. She noticed that the severed duct's end before her seemed to be slipping upward, and realized with fresh horror that the section of tunnel she was in had been cut completely loose from its supports and was now falling freely from God only knew how high, carrying her with it. Leela braced her feet and back against the walls of the flimsy metal tube and waited for the end.   
But the end didn't come. Minutes after the echoes of the last blast had ceased to reverberate through her skull, and just as she was nerving herself to go take a peek out of the shattered end of the tunnel ahead, the duct fragment landed with a BANG. It was not the crushing blow she had anticipated, having been raised on a fair-sized terrestrial world, but still the force of the impact knocked the wind completely out of her and sent her tumbling out into the open.   
Lying on her back, burned, gasping for air and bleeding from a dozen scrapes and cuts, Leela opened her eye to gaze at a ceiling hundreds of meters over her head. It was crisscrossed with a lattice of what must have been thousands of power conduits and ventilation ducts, all looking like silver threads at their olympian height. With a torturous effort, she lifted herself to one elbow and looked to her side... and then down... and down... and collapsed again, mind-warping vertigo added to her list of troubles.   
Leela was lying on the edge of a grated metal catwalk that encircled the perimeter of a cavernous cylindrical pit kilometers across. The walls of the pit went down forever. If there was a bottom to the abyss, it was completely lost in stygian darkness. 'Cavernous' did not even begin to do it justice. As she fought valiantly to maintain control of her sanity and bodily functions, she heard a low scraping sound and looked over just in time to see the battered length of tubing she had arrived in overbalance, teeter on the edge of the catwalk for a long minute or so, and then slide lazily off into empty space. Leela turned her face forward again, eye tightly closed, trying to control the irrational urge to keep watching its slow fall into the dark.   
"Shit," she whispered to herself, sadly. "I'm going to die here, and I'll never even rot." Something snapped inside her then, all of the carefully suppressed grief, terror and guilt which had been building in her since she had first seen that damned helmet welled up at once, collapsing emotional floodgates. For a long time she just lay there, sobbing softly, unable to find the willpower to go on. She heard Amy's ribcage crumpling like a wicker basket again, and saw Fry dashed against the ground by his impaled shoulders. She had landed with one arm hanging out over the void, and now she was thinking seriously about how easy it would be to just roll over, push off from the edge...   
Until it dawned on her that not all of her pain and nausea was related to her wounds. Her radiation suit was gone for good, and that sunburn was getting worse. If she were to jump off into that yawning abyss, she knew, she would broil to death long before she had a chance to hit the bottom.   
With agonizing slowness, and without knowing precisely why, Leela gripped the surface of the catwalk behind her and pulled, dragging herself back from the edge. Still whimpering quietly, she gradually eased herself into a sitting position, back pressed up against the cold, smooth wall behind her. Carefully averting her eye from the bottomless horror below, she started scanning the rest of the room. It turned out to not be quite so empty as she had initially thought; at a few locations along the circumference of the immense space the catwalk branched off and extended inward and upward to meet a thing suspended from the domed ceiling, softly illuminated by weak floodlights.   
A thing, she realized, that could only be a ship, albeit a weird one. It had a silvery, hemispherical main hull about thirty meters across, with a large elliptical viewport on what she assumed must be the front. Two gigantic thruster pods were located on swiveling gimbal mounts on its flanks, and more than a dozen bulky tools and sensory devices dangled beneath its flat bottom at the ends of long, segmented metal tentacles, giving the ship the overall appearance of a robotic jellyfish built by a madman. A maintenance vehicle, Leela decided; it was designed to float down this bottomless shaft and conduct repairs where necessary. It was possibly radiation shielded, and there was the barest chance that it had survived the nukes and the centuries in working order. For the first time in what seemed an eternity, hope began to form in the back of her mind.   
Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Leela rose to her feet- only to stagger back against the wall under the impact of nausea and vertigo. _Come on, pull it together_, she mentally chided herself. _You can do it. Be the nail-eating bulletproof badass you've always been proud to be._   
Slowly and shakily, with one hand on the wall for support, she began to walk along the curved catwalk towards the base of the closest ramp. It looked as though it must have been over a kilometer away, and she was just beginning to wonder if she should pick up the pace at the risk of becoming dizzy and toppling over the edge when she noticed something odd ahead. On the ground, at the base of the bridge, a tiny red light was flickering in the darkness. After several seconds of glancing away and back again, she decided that her eye was perfectly all right, and that there was in fact something lying on the ground in her path giving off light. She covered the last fifty meters silently, crawling and holding her breath. Not until she was almost on top of the dark shape stretched out across the metal did she recognize the small, battered form of Professor Irwin Drake.   
He was gazing peacefully into where the sky should have been, head pillowed on his hands. A lot more peacefully than he had any apparent reason to be; his right leg seemed to have picked up an extra knee, and the fabric of his torn pressure suit pants was soggy with blood. Hearing Leela's approach, he removed the lit stub of a cigarette from his mouth and waved lazily. "Captain," he called, pleased. "I see you had slightly better luck with the air pipes than I did. Smoke?"   
"No. Thanks." She chewed her lip, wondering if she ought to point out the obvious. "Ummm... I don't know if you've noticed this, but- "   
"Well, then," the archaeologist went on cheerfully, "perhaps I could interest you in some Anesthetrol-J." He unclipped the portable autodoc unit from its place on his suit's hip, opened its case and extracted a thin glass ampoule half full of a straw-colored fluid. "It's supposed to be injected, but I'm pretty sure you can just drink it, too."   
"God... Drake, surely you need that stuff more than I do!"   
He made a dismissive gesture. "Nah, I'm good. 'Doc dosed me to last till long after I either get rescued or bleed dry. You, on the other hand, can't be feeling great from all this radiation. Go on, take it."   
Reluctantly, Leela took the capsule and popped the top off. "How much am I supposed to take?"   
"Doesn't matter; the effects are the same regardless of dosage, but they last longer if you take more. That'll keep you going for hours." He turned his head to study the alien spacecraft in the distance as Leela downed the serum. Eventually he spoke again. "If you can get that ship going you might come back for me, but I'm never going to make it up there myself. Did any of the others get out of there?" She shook her head sadly, and he sighed. "Listen... about the Thrupp. There's a reason they want you this badly; the exact same reason they've got such a serious space navy. If you're trying to wipe out another sentient race before they reach a stage where they could possibly compete for resources or worlds, then it behooves you not to leave the job unfinished. The Cyclopses did just that; they underestimated Chuthrupt and lost their Berserker. More than that, they've made themselves mortal enemies of the meanest, most heavily armed and most bloody-minded fanatical folk in the known universe. The Thrupp have no interest in military conquest over the Cyclopses; they mean to exterminate them. Right down to the last infant. They can do it, too, just as soon as they find the Cyclops homeworld." He looked her straight in the eye, very somber. "If they recover your body, captain, your people will not stand the slightest chance in hell."   
Leela stood, staring into the endless depths below. She was thinking of the countless barren, featureless worlds she had watched drift past outside her ship. Worlds on which it seemed no living thing had ever existed. Just now, she was wondering how many of those worlds had not always been that way.   
At last she spoke, her voice surprisingly clear. "If the Thrupp want my carcass, then as far as I'm concerned, they're welcome to it. But they're going to have to wait their turn; I'm not done with it just yet." With that, she started up the bridge.   
The air was cool over the pit, and for the first time since her arrival on the moon ship a refreshing breeze could be felt. Leela wondered if there could be a hole through to vacuum somewhere below, but then decided that any sizable breach would have had plenty of time over the ages to depressurize the entire complex. The pit must simply have been wide and deep enough to have its own coriolis winds. Either way, she no longer had her magnetic boots and the breeze, while pleasant, was conspiring with the low gravity to undermine her footing. At least she couldn't feel the sunburn anymore...   
Then she realized that she couldn't feel much of anything anymore; the combination of painkillers and radiation poisoning was starting to have weird effects on her nervous system. Her legs were completely numb, and her sense of balance was turning chaotic. Startled, she wobbled madly for a moment before pitching face first into the ground. One hand slipped off of the edge of the catwalk, and she ended up banging her head sharply against the metal. _The Anesthetrol_, she thought frantically. _Dammit, Leela, a little pain wouldn't have killed you, but another fall sure as hell could._ It was a few minutes before she could gather the strength to push herself onto all fours and begin crawling onward, clutching the grating firmly with her hands to keep from rolling over the edge. That was when she noticed the tremor.   
The surface of the bridge was trembling ever so slightly at regular intervals. At first she wondered if some ancient machinery was still at work, but quickly dismissed the notion. It had, after all, been centuries. She frowned in consternation, and lowered her ear to the walkway. A faint, regular booming was echoing through the metal at a rate of about twice per second... and getting louder. "Shit," Leela blurted hoarsely, suddenly realizing the cause. With the entire moon ship to hide in, she had nevertheless managed to get herself cornered beyond any chance of escape. As she turned to gawk in horror at the faraway Thrupp shape charging up the narrow bridge, it came to her that she didn't need to see her pursuer's face or the blood on his shoulder hooks to guess exactly who he was.   
Leela staggered to her feet, and started loping unsteadily toward the yawning hatch in the side of the alien ship ahead. Sweat dripped into her eye, blurring her vision, and she no longer had any sense of balance at all. Bounding a meter into the air with each step, she heard another round from Tagguth's hand launcher pop and whistle past high overhead. Next time, she knew, he would have compensated for the feeble gravity. The doorway was only a dozen meters away now, and she saw with dismay that it was easily big enough to admit a full- grown Thrupp.   
Leela heard a POP sound behind her, and on instinct jumped just as a shell pinged off of the catwalk beneath her heel and went spinning into the open door to burst in a cloud of fire and shrapnel. She landed rolling and was somehow back on her feet again facing the wrong direction. Spinning slivers of hot metal slashed the back of her arms and neck, but there was still no pain; merely a tickling sensation briefly impinging on her overall numbness. Tagguth was much closer now and advancing like a runaway maglev, and Leela was fairly certain that he was planning to flatten her like one. She turned back toward the smoke-filled doorway and was inside the ship in an eyeblink.   
It was much too dark inside the ship to make out the details of her surroundings even had she had the time to spend, but she remembered where the control cabin had seemed to be, and took the wide corridor on her left, toward the front of the ship. At one point she stumbled over a dark, crumpled shape stretched out on the floor, but she was in no mood to stop and investigate. An airtight hatch door at the end of the hallway ahead of her was standing slightly ajar, and she collided with it hard, shouldering it open, before skidding to a halt and slamming it closed behind her. There was a weird sort of latch at the side of the door, and as she fumbled at it with nerveless fingers she noticed that the skin on her hands had become a sick shade of reddish gray and was breaking out in blisters. The lock snapped shut, but the metallic click brought Leela no comfort; she knew enough about radiation poisoning to understand that she had already absorbed much more than a lethal dose, and that the persistent dizziness and ringing in her ears were more than a lingering effect of the explosions.   
Mustering the very last of her energy, she staggered over to collapse in one of the two crash couches in front of the viewport, and surveyed the alien controls hopelessly. Given enough time, she decided finally, she could perhaps have figured out how to operate the ship... but there was no time; Tagguth was surely in the ship by now, closing on her fast. And to top it all off, just to add insult to injury, the control board had been almost totally dismantled. Among the tangled, corroded wire and semiconductors inside the open console, she could see pinch clamps, tape and beads of still-shiny solder where some poor cyclops bastard had tried desperately and in vain to make repairs to the only vehicle that could have saved him from the blasted corpse of the moon ship.   
With a bitter, exhausted sigh, Leela sank back into the chair and gazed out of the viewport. Thunderous footsteps were now audible behind the cabin door and getting louder rapidly, and she wondered idly whether or not the Thrupp soldier would be able to get in before she kicked off. Not that it mattered much any more, but she didn't particularly want to be brought back alive and healed if it was just going to mean stalling the inevitable. That reminded her of Drake; she craned her head forward to see if he was visible from the ship, but it was far too dark outside and her vision was already badly blurred. She hoped that Tagguth had not stepped on him in passing, and that he was going to be rescued.   
The door rattled in its frame... and as Leela started to turn toward it, she noticed the occupant of the other crash couch for the first time.   
The mummy was superbly preserved, and its hand still clutched the soldering gun which had failed to save it. It wore the same red uniform which Amy had discovered much earlier. It stared sightlessly back at her, its facial expression completely unreadable. The door exploded out of its frame.   
Leela had only a split second of consciousness left, but it was just long enough to grasp the implications of this last find. In the instant before the butt of Tagguth's sidearm met her skull with a CRACK that turned out all thought like a light, she felt only a weird sense of relief. 

* * * 

The world was a featureless white plane suspended three meters overhead, with vaguely familiar voices murmuring very far away. The air carried a faint medicinal odor, and there was a cool, soft surface below. Gravity seemed much heavier than it had been recently, but not uncomfortably so. It wasn't so bad being dead; there was nothing to do except lie there and relax.   
"Stimulant," said a deep, rumbling voice, and "-not long now." Something cold pressed against her neck with a quiet hiss, and a tingling warmth started to seep into her limbs and brain.   
Fry watched nervously as Leela stirred in the autodoc bed, and her eye started to lose its glazed look. Behind him, Amy was also watching from the gel-filled tank of a surgical unit. The lower half of Leela's face was obscured by a respirator mask, but he could still recognize the confusion setting in as her gaze swept the unfamiliar surroundings of the Choftareph's medical bay and presently settled on him.   
He cleared his throat awkwardly. "Um... hiya. Feeling better?"   
Leela blinked, and her jaw moved for a moment as though she was trying to speak. Finally, she coughed wetly and managed to croak, "Feeling. It's more than I expected."   
"More than any of us expected, for a while there," the voice she had heard before commented. Director Hrauggh walked around from behind the control console at the head of the bed and looked down at her without malice. "You seem to have a much greater resistance to radiation than we do; you survived more than a kilorem down there. Even so, we had to replace most of your marrow and certain vital organs from cloned tissue."   
Leela stared back at the towering alien, dazed and bewildered. Eventually, she settled on a suitable question. "Pardon me for sounding like an ass," she rasped, "but exactly what happened back there?"   
The director scraped his shoulder hooks together behind his head. A Thrupp's substitute for a shrug, she decided. "We're not altogether clear on that, I'm afraid. All we know is that one of our search parties came down entry point six and immediately ran into Agent Tagguth. He had removed his radiation suit and had you and Professor Drake wrapped up in it like a blanket. Fortunately, he was also carrying that." Hrauggh pointed toward a gurney on the other side of the medical bay, where Leela recognized her acquaintance from the bridge of the alien maintenance ship.   
It was an average sized humanoid with one eye in the center of its forehead... and there the resemblance to anything she had ever seen before ended. The skin was a shiny, damp looking greenish blue covered in thin spiderweb-like silver veins, and a broad band of gills running around the back of its head. Its three-fingered hands were webbed and each digit ended in a short, barbed claw. The single beady, lidless red eye sat directly between two small orifices which might have been nostrils or ears. The mouth, however, was by far the most nightmarish part; the creature's face stretched forward and downward below the eye into a flexible round snout which ended in a gaping, lamprey-like maw filled with ring after ring of visciously sharp little rasping teeth. In a sudden flash of insight, Leela realized that the room full of hanging carcasses had not been a meat locker at all. Just a mess hall.   
Another thought occurred to her. "Tagguth and Drake? How-?"   
"Professor Drake will be just fine. Tagguth..." Hrauggh hesitated. "As I may have mentioned earlier, Thrupp are much more vulnerable to hard radiation than most other species. Agent Tagguth was dead when the search party arrived."   
The uncomfortable silence which followed was broken by Bender's appearance. He paused briefly at the door to strike a match on what looked a lot like an alien 'No smoking' sign and light up a cigar, and headed on in. "Yo, Fry, ol' buddy. How them shoulders coming along?" He slapped Fry heartily on the back, ignoring his pained yelp, then noticed Leela. "Hey, one-eye pulled through. Good for her!"   
Bender was definitely not at his best; his torso looked like a cylindrical metal jigsaw puzzle somebody had welded together in a hurry, and Leela told him as much. He just snorted. "Honey, I don't know just how aware you are of the fact, but you've looked a hell of a lot better yourself. Ooh, Fry, you wanna tell her about her hair, or can I?"   
"Hair? What's wrong with my... Oh." Leela broke off, running a hand over the fuzzy purple stubble that covered her scalp. She turned toward Hrauggh, but he had retired to the far end of the room to confer with the medical technician monitoring Amy's 'doc tank. "Meh," she said with a dismissive shrug. "It'll grow back." Drake chose that moment to glide into the room in a ground-effect chair, looking pale and haggard.   
"Heeeey... Captain, how goes it?" He managed a sickly smile which faded rapidly. "They, uh, they tell me you're gonna be back on your feet in a day or so. Look, I'm sorry about everything that's happened here. I knew they were looking for an unidentified species, and I knew that you were an unidentified species... I just didn't put two and two together. I should have left you aboard ship until I was sure they weren't cyclopses. Uh, well, your kind of cyclopses; you know what I mean."   
Leela shook her head feebly. "No, dammit, it wasn't your fault. Yours either, Amy. Hey, can she hear me in there?" Fry shook his head, and she sighed. "Hell... nor Tagguth's. I'm sorry to see that lizard go; I would have liked to get to know him under saner circumstances. It was just fate screwing around with all of us."   
Hrauggh returned then. "Professor," he said, nodding toward Drake as he took a seat. "I heard about your recall, and I'm sorry. Rest assured that the Chuthrupt Archaeology Administration will pay all of Planet Express's extra fees."   
"Recall?" Fry asked, puzzled.   
"Yah. My tour of the moon ship's been canceled, and I'm wanted back on Earth as soon as physics will allow. Oh well, I guess it's not so bad. No offense, Director, but the events of the last few days would tend to make anyone more than a little homesick." He scowled. "No, I don't mind having to return... but that wasn't the only call I got. Seems I'm not going to be writing any articles about this trip; the DCIA rep was very clear on that point. And if any of us ever tries to make a fuss about this 'incident' on any DOOP world we'll be put away for diplomatic sabotage. Officially, none of this ever happened. Politicians," he finished, saying the word to rhyme with "scum".   
Hrauggh looked at the floor, embarrassed. "I'm sorry," he repeated. "For what it's worth, my government has issued a statement apologizing for this whole fiasco and thanking you all for your help in finding the real enemy." He leaned over to double check the bio-monitor again, then stood and addressed Leela. "I'll leave you alone for a while now; I imagine you need your rest. Good day." He turned and made his exit.   
Drake nodded. "Yeah, that reminds me. Farnsworth called too; you'll be pissed to know he's already scheduled another delivery for you. No big deal, just hauling a cargo of herbicide to Gummidgy, but it's in only three days. Anyway, see you all back on the ship."   
As the rest of the group departed, Fry hung back, still a little worried. Leela was plainly exhausted, but he got the feeling that something else was bothering her. "Hey," he said quietly. "What is it?"   
"Oh. Nothing, I'm fine." But Fry did not leave, and she pondered whether to say anything else for a while. At last she spoke, hesitantly. "It's just... Fry, you know how alone I've felt at times. It's not just from being an orphan; there are lots of orphans. Not knowing my family I can deal with. But I don't even know my species. I've been desperate to find my people for as long as I can remember, but it never even occurred to me that if I ever encounter them, I might find that there's nowhere I really belong."   
Fry started to say something, but she raised a hand. "Yes, I know. They didn't build that ship, our little 'demons' did." She glanced at the mummy briefly. "But that doesn't change the fact that I really have no way at all of knowing what my people are like. They might be people. But they just might be monsters."   
Fry just stood there for a long while, sympathetic but badly unsettled. "Leela..." he eventually said, uneasily, "You're right, they might be. Even if they are, though- I doubt you really need to be told this, but nothing's ever going to make any of us think you're a monster. You're a good person, Leela, regardless of anything else." On an impulse, he reached out and gave her hand a comforting squeeze. "And you'll always have friends you can count on for support."   
With a weary, affectionate smile, Leela squeezed his hand back. "Except for Bender," she added after a long moment.   
Fry guffawed. "Yeah, except for Bender."   
The two friends shared a lengthy chuckle. 

* * * 

The bloated orange disk of Chuthrupt's sun had just slipped beneath the surreally warped horizon, casting the scarred metal plain into abrupt darkness. The lights in the sprawling camp in the distance began to gradually come to life, and work continued uninterrupted as the night shift came out to take over. From a kilometer away, the massive aliens going about their business appeared to scurry ant-like around and inside the the softly glowing inflated domes.   
The sleek shape of the small freighter trembled slightly as the boarding ramp and aft landing pads slid back into its hull. The ship floated for a few seconds above the surface as the blue glow of Cherenkov radiation slowly built up in the core of its main thruster. Then it smoothly tilted upward until vertical, and began its unhurried ascent, vanishing into the darkness as it left the floodlights of the camp far behind.   
The brilliant glow of its exhaust, however, was still visible from the ground as the ship began its acceleration to relativistic speeds, and Hrauggh waited until the miniature blue sun overhead had shrunk to a dim green spark and faded from view before turning away and walking on to where his colleagues awaited him at the next dig site. 


End file.
